Problem
Our customer has a monthly process through which remote employees around the globe submit a monthly report including relevant data required by the Company. Reports are submitted via email in an untimely and unstructured way. Such data includes sensitive business information which is used to take informative decisions related to market relations and other legal matters. Currently there are over 40 remote sites globally and the amount of data being captured through these reports is very siloed and, unstructured and time consuming to compile and analyse. The customer wanted to have a systematic and structure process for gathering this data in a timely fashion.
Main painpoints:
- Data not reaching ministry on time
- Reports not structured and having a different template per remote site making it very time consuming to extract relevant information
- All reports on email having a large dependency on specific users
- Difficult for customer to identify salient points
Solution
A process solution was designed using K2 Technology enabling all remote sites to submit the required data systematically and going through an approval process with head office. Data submitted is organised in 14 sections having multiple titles per section and implementing a number of business rules such as validations to ensure that the data reported is validated at source.
The implemented solution automatically issues multiple reminders to remote sites on specific dates prior to the monthly deadline to encourage a timely submission and eliminating human intervention. The submitted report goes through multi-tier approval levels. Once all the relevant approvals from the Head of Departments have been received, the report is automatically consolidated into a single report for that specific month. This is automatically forwarded to the Directors and the department heads are notified of such acceptance.
The approved data is stored on a Microsoft Hybrid Cloud environment. This provides a seamless integration to other Microsoft Cloud services such as Power BI. A number of dashboards have been designed providing a good level of visibility across the process. Furthermore, the directors also have the possibility to use Power BI Dashboards to analyse the data better to take informative decisions without the need to read through hundreds of report pages.
Customer Gains:
- Important and relevant data reaching the customer on time and with the right quality.
- Captured data presented on a business intelligence tool through visual dashboards making the analysis process more efficient.
- Possibility to access the system securely from anywhere, at anytime through a web browser.
- Reducing drastically the number of emails and manual reminders.
- This solution has helped the Directors in reducing the time taken to go through this process from weeks to literally minutes.